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public health
Groups Warn Trump Executive Orders Would Spike Cancers Caused by Exposure to Nuclear Radiation
A letter implored the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power."
Nov 14, 2025
A series of nuclear power-related executive orders issued by President Donald Trump seek to legitimize people's "suffering as the price of nuclear expansion," said one expert at Beyond Nuclear on Friday, as the nongovernmental organization spearheaded a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and top Trump administration officials warning of the public health risks of the orders.
More than 40 civil society groups—including Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Sierra Club, Nuclear Watch South, and the Appalachian Peace Education Center—signed the letter to the commission, calling on officials not to revise the NRC's Standards for Protection Against Radiation, as they were directed to earlier this year by Trump.
"NRC has not made a revision yet, and has been hearing that the Part 20 exposure (external only) should be taken from the existing 100 mr [milliroentgen] a year, per license, to 500 mr a year, and in view of some, even to 10 Rems [Roentgen Equivalent Man], which would be 100 times the current level," reads the letter.
In 2021, noted PSR, the NRC "roundly rejected" a petition "to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year."
The revision to radiation limit standards would result in anywhere from 5-100 times less protection for Americans, said the groups, with 4 out of 5 adult males exposed over a 70-year lifetime developing cancer that they otherwise would not have.
"Radiation is dangerous for everyone,” said Amanda M. Nichols, lead author of the 2024 study Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate. This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. ”
The change in standards would be even more consequential for women, including pregnant women, and children—all of whom are disproportionately susceptible to health impacts of ionizing radiation, compared to adult males.
"Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
In Gender and Ionizing Radiation, Nichols and biologist Mary Olson examined atomic bomb survivor data and found that young girls "face twice the risk as boys of the same age, and have four to five times the risk of developing cancer later in life than a woman exposed in adulthood."
Despite the risks to some of the country's most vulnerable people, Trump has also called for a revision of "the basis of the NRC regulation," reads Friday's letter: the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model, the principle that there is no safe level of radiation and that cancer risk to proportional to dose.
The LNT model is supported by decades of peer-reviewed research, the letter states, but one of Trump's executive orders calls for "an additional weakening of protection by setting a threshold, or level, below which radiation exposure would not 'count' or be considered as to have not occurred."
The Standards for Protection Against Radiation are "based on the well-documented findings that even exposures so small that they cannot be measured may, sometimes, result in fatal cancer," reads the letter. "The only way to reduce risk to zero requires zero radiation exposure."
Trump's orders "would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus supporting the LNT model," it adds.
The signatories noted that the US government could and should strengthen radiation regulations by ending its reliance on "Reference Man"—a model that the NRC uses to create its risk assessments, which is based on a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impact on infants, young children, and women.
“Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies," reads the letter. "Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities… not weakened. Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
Olson, who is the CEO of the Generational Radiation Impact Project, which also helped organize the letter, warned that "radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”
The groups emphasized that "executive orders do not have the power to require federal agencies to take actions that violate their governing statutes, nor to grant them powers and authorities that contradict those governing statutes. The NRC needs to stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate under the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 and the concurrent amendments to the Atomic Energy Act."
Federal agencies including the NRC, they added, "should not favor industry propaganda asserting that some radiation is safe over science-based protection of the public. This is a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests."
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As World Convenes in Brazil, WHO Warns of Dire Health Impacts of Climate Crisis
"The climate crisis is a health crisis—not in the distant future, but here and now."
Nov 14, 2025
The World Health Organization on Friday issued a report documenting what it described as a "global health emergency" being caused by the climate crisis.
The report, which was released jointly by the WHO, the government of Brazil, and the Brazilian Ministry of Health at the start of the United Nations climate summit (COP30) being held in Belém, Brazil, warns that global healthcare infrastructure is not currently sufficient to deal with the climate emergency, and that "1 in 12 hospitals could face climate-related shutdowns" worldwide.
Overall, the report finds that hospitals are experiencing "41% higher risk of damage from extreme weather-related impact compared to 1990," and that the number of at-risk health facilities could double if the global temperature continues rising at its current pace.
Ethel Maciel, COP30’s special envoy for health, said that flooding that decimated the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul last year showed the importance taking the climate crisis seriously, especially since the floods also led to "the largest dengue epidemic in history, driven by these climate changes."
"So, it is not something for us to think about in the future; it’s happening now," Maciel added. "So, thinking about how to adapt our system is urgent.”
Professor Nick Watts, director of the NUS Centre for Sustainable Medicine, recommended dedicating 7% of current climate adaptation finance toward making healthcare infrastructure more resilient to climate change, which he said would "safeguard billions of people and keep essential services operating during climate shocks—when our patients most need them."
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the report should give nations urgency to decarbonize as quickly as possible.
"The climate crisis is a health crisis—not in the distant future, but here and now," he said. "This special report provides evidence on the impact of climate change on individuals and health systems, and real-world examples of what countries can do—and are doing—to protect health and strengthen health systems."
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Mandani Won by Centering the Needs of New Yorkers
Mamdani has taken a page out of the Community Health Scientists’ playbook and has developed a plan by the people and for the people.
Nov 07, 2025
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign captured young voters' attention in a mayoral election in ways that haven’t been seen in a long time. Voters under 30 turned out early, and 73% of all young voters polled planed to voted for him. This resulted in over 1 million voters casting a ballot for Mamdani as mayor, the biggest turnout in years.
Much of the media has attributed this engagement to his age (34), his use of social media, and his perceived accessibility. While this is a good assessment, it misses the core of what makes him effective, and that is his use of public-health community engagement strategies. He is talking to the people without an agenda and then using his platform to help fulfill their needs.
As a community health scientist by training and the associate director of the Office of Community Engagement and Neighborhood Health Partnerships at University of Illinois, Chicago-University of Illinois Health, I’ve spent the last 17 years working to improve the lives of the historically redlined and disinvested communities to which I belong. The key principal for community engagement is centering the needs of the community and engaging a diverse, representative group of people to wrestle with information from a variety of viewpoints all to the end of making better decisions.
Mamdani’s victory was predicated, in large part, on this very approach.
He engaged the city of New York, and they supported him back.
An excellent example of this is his video on halalflation (Halal Inflation). In this video, Mamdani interviews several food truck owners and examines what is driving the cost. Unanimously, they describe paying nearly $20,000 a year to rent a permit from someone who pays only $400 to the city. A $19,600 profit for someone who had the fortune of owning something with an arbitrarily limited supply.
Mamdani then shares four proposed bills that would address this issue and allow more permits for food truck owners. An elegant solution to a real problem that has the potential to reduce the cost of running a food truck, potentially making the meal more affordable. It is a brilliantly simple video, but it speaks volumes about the type of politician he claims to be. It is not common to see a politician dig into the core issues that affect people's lives and offer real, palatable solutions. Bringing down the cost of food is a relevant issue.
The cost of groceries is of paramount concern to people.
President Donald Trump said, “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods” (including groceries) at a rally in Bozeman, Montana. Yet Trump was visibly flustered in an interview last week with Norah O’Donnell and "60 Minutes" when pressed on the increase in grocery prices, which haven’t decreased.
One of Mamdani’s more unconventional proposals has been his idea of a network of city-owned grocery stores—without rent or property taxes, the hope is they will pass the savings onto the customer.
His opponent, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, tried to suggest that this idea is laughable and naively idealistic. Neither of these statements is accurate; there are many municipalities that are engaging in the same idea of trying to make life better for residents. In St. Paul, Kansas, the city opened a grocery store in response to a demand from the community.
Not all municipalities will arrive at a city=owned grocery store, but a city-supported food enterprise is not as outlandish as it is presented. Consider the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia—it’s a public market, or the Milwaukee Public Market, a quasi-government run market. In my hometown, Chicago, I am a part of the Food Equity Council and was a part of a listening session that explored a city-owned grocery store. The group settled on exploring a Public Market, similar to the Milwaukee market.
The common thread here is a political administration that is trying to improve the lives of its residents.
Mamdani has embraced these principles. He engaged the city of New York, and they supported him back. It’s not about the fast, free buses or the city-owned grocery stores or the funny videos; it’s that Mamdani has offered more than the typical Democratic Party talking points. Mamdani is not responding to Republican threats or fighting Republicans.
Mamdani has taken a page out of the Community Health Scientists’ playbook and has developed a plan by the people and for the people.
Many Democrats will tout the great social media campaign, but they should take away the elegance of engaging the community where they are and developing a sound plan that puts the people front and center.
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